The day ‘the Torch’ came for us….

I just wanted to get on with my day. All I could do was to try to ignore the anticipation for the Olympic Torch being carried down roads in my local area. ‘A waste of money when savage welfare cuts are being made’ is the most easy to grab sentence attached to a web of reasons why the London Olympics should be a cause for concern. But it (in the form of the Olympic torch) came for usall; up down the country it danced in the hand of a willing participant; the tune it played may have sounded like one for the people, for the joy of global participation, but it was playing the tune of nationalist pride so as we didn’t forget it so soon after the Jubilee. And, as soon it came close to your home, it was now an event one must not miss. ‘But don’t protest or anything, because that would send the wrong image to the rest of the world’.Like with the sudden interest in ‘Kate Middleton’s dress’ by those previously disinterested, those who weren’t at all interested in the Olympics are now eager to see ‘the torch’ as the spectacle passes nearby. Why? What feeling does one get that concludes that it is something they MUST witness?
The old feudal identity of such nations as Britain clings on! Now, I am obviously not suggesting that the Olympics has anything Empirically to do with this feudal order, which openly continues in an opaque form, and secretly exists in a solid form, but all the events in such a country as ours exploit this feudalistic nature of this culture to demand interest form the population when push comes to shove regardless of their objective interests previously; old Europe, despite its superficial advancements is still pretty much the beast it was in medieval times. Of course, the best one can do is to ignore the entire spectacle; ignore the shouts for us to open our doors and run out onto our streets waving flags; don’t give it the power it gains from hype, be it positive or negative. But the media doesn’t allow this: it makes the hype so omnipresent that we cannot but help robotically repeat the latest gossip.I would argue that 2012 as been a year of great counterrevolutionary endeavours by the power structure of this nation especially: all attempt has been made by the state to pacify growing conscious/and pure reactionary dissent (such as the riots) that to an untrained gaze seemed to spring from nowhere in 2011 to oppose the entirety of the insanity of capitalism under the easy to grasp banner of opposition to the cuts . I think anybody who wants a better future for us all had good reason to be optimistic at the end of 2011 that awareness and distrust in the system was growing. But this growing and justly felt threat the nation state feels, as it tries to protect capitalist interests from the people it claims to protect, had a great chance to be eased this year with so many ‘events’ which it could exploit to both distract people and give them a false sense of belonging and happiness, in the hyperbole that precedes the climax of such events – from which the ensuing emptiness one should expect to feel has hopefully (for the state) lost track of any of the likely causations. So far this year, it looks like they have done a very good job at distracting us.

But there again, once all this dies down and we all wake up to a society even worse than before the hype set in, things could actually really kick off. But with weather patterns more dodgy by the year applying a background crescendo to the unavoidably obvious uncertainty about a century still in its infancy, what so scares me about all of this is also the source of what gives me most reason to get out of the bed in the morning and convince myself that I (with what little I actually do) may be part of a new human force to change things for the better.

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About John Ledger

A visual Artist, eternal meanderer and obsessive self-reflector by nature, who can’t help but try to interpret everything from within the tide of society. His works predominantly take the form of large scale ballpoint pen landscape drawings and map-making as social/psychological note-making. They are slowly-accumulating responses to crises inflicted upon the self in the perplexing, fearful, empty, and often personality-erasing human world.